


Harvest

by tree



Category: Girl with a Pearl Earring - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Misses Clause Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 08:05:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2805497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tree/pseuds/tree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After marrying Pieter, Griet's life unfolds in an unexpected way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Harvest

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Syksy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Syksy/gifts).



> I've taken the liberty of borrowing certain details from the novel where they don't conflict with the film narrative, and otherwise fudging the details of real people and history.

> We cannot live in a world that is not our own, in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light. —Hildegard von Bingen

 

**1667**

 

The first colours arrived three weeks after my wedding.

The parcel was unmarked, wrapped in plain paper and tied with string. There was no note or direction, nothing to tell me where it had come from or who had left it. I found it at the gate of our small courtyard, where the chickens pecked at the dirt and I hung the washing to bleach in the sun. It was a sickly sun that morning, hidden by thin, high clouds. I took the parcel into the kitchen and cut the string with a knife. My stomach knotted as I peeled back the paper and smoothed it flat with chilled fingers. In front of me sat a plain wooden box with simple brass hinges. A foolish sense of foreboding gripped me as I looked at it. Some part of me already knew who had sent it.

I took a deep breath and raised the lid to find perhaps a dozen squares of wrapped parchment. I lifted one carefully and unfolded it. My breath caught when the light met the finely ground pile of lead white. I opened another to find the deep shadow of bone black. A third, rich ochre. 

By the time I had spread all the packets open before me, my sight was blurred by tears. I had never felt such intense joy as I did among the familiar scents and colours, the work of his hands. If I closed my eyes I could imagine that I was back in the attic above his studio with him by my side.

He had ground them for me.

My throat constricted and I walked out of the kitchen to sit on the newly washed steps of my home, so frozen within myself that the cold could not touch me. I was filled with confusion and a hurt that took my breath away.

The hands in my lap did not tremble. They had begun to heal slowly, with regular use of my mother's bergamot in oil and the lanolin that Pieter the father brought me. My skin had lost the redness that had spoken of hours in hot water, the cracks made by salt and lye had closed, and the rough callouses had softened and smoothed. I felt that they were finally returning to hands I recognised as my own when for so long they had belonged to someone else, some other girl who wasn't me. 

On most days, my life as a maid seemed so far removed from me that it was as if it were a story I had been told. A story that passed from my memory as the telling of it vanished my from skin. In time only the scars would remain. And what were scars but an ending? The completion of the tale.

But this gift had made the tale fresh again in my mind. It no longer existed as vague pictures of a figure in the distance, but with the sharp, bloodless prick of remembrance.

In the weeks following my removal from the house at Papist's Corner, I had hung suspended in a numbness that allowed me to glide effortlessly on the surface of my life. Yet there were nights when I was unable to sleep and I would step quietly out of the house to stare up at the stars above me. The moon reflected on the water of the canal like the lustre of a pearl. On those nights I fought against wild, frantic thoughts of returning to him and begging him to take me in, to let me stay. All I wanted was to be again in the clear light of his studio and the frigid air of the attic, grinding the colours. For him to talk to me because I understood; to look at me as though he truly saw me. To be near him.

Hours later, in the weak winter morning light, I would be ashamed. How could I even contemplate such things? Where was my sense? My pride? Then I would remember how he looked away the day Catharina ordered me, screaming, from her house. And I would remember the silence as I waited for him to speak. That heavy, aching silence. And the pain would be like breathing slivers of ice.

On those days I was especially attentive to Pieter. If he had ever suspected that my affection was born of guilt, he never gave any sign.

I turned my head to gaze back into the kitchen at the box on the table, wondering what it meant. What did he think I could do with the colours other than remember? They were even less useful than the earrings he had made me wear. The pearls, at least, I could sell. It was as if he were taunting me with what I had presumed to want. A banquet in a room I could see but not enter.

I knew him to be many things, but I had never thought him cruel.

I did not know how to paint. Even if I wished to make an attempt, how did he think I was to afford canvas and brushes? Although the life of a butcher's wife was considerably more secure than that of a blind tiler's daughter or a maid, there was still little money for frivolous things. Much of any extra went to my parents, and although Pieter never reproached me or seemed at all to begrudge them, I sought as much economy as I could.

Even if I were to find a way to afford what I would need, how was I to find the time? A wife had almost as much work to do as a maid. It was more pleasant to be my own mistress and to work for myself and my family, but it was still work.

Already that morning I had washed and hung the clothes, scrubbed the front and back steps, and cut the vegetables for our evening meal. In a few hours I would go to our stall at the Meat Hall to serve customers until it was time to close for the day. When we came home, I would cook our meal and clean afterwards. Then I would sew until it was time for bed. And in bed, Pieter would reach for me, and that, too, was a kind of work.

In the morning it would all begin again. The days of my life extended before me in their sameness like the chill, thin light of winter: no depth or texture to mark any difference at all.

Two of the chickens began squabbling and I watched them until they pecked themselves back to peace. It was that unresisting peacefulness I strove to master. It had been disturbed but I would find it again, I told myself as I rose from the step. I would.

I was a no longer a maid. My former master had no claim on me anymore. Not on my time, nor my thoughts, nor my heart. Whatever had been his presumption in sending me such a gift, it was not welcome. Yet I could not simply get rid of it. Those beautiful colours were too precious.

In the kitchen I carefully folded each square of parchment and placed it inside the box. I rewrapped its paper and retied the string. Then I put it in the back of the cupboard underneath the spare bed linens. Pieter would never go there. It would be as though it had never existed at all.

I told myself to ignore it, but it stayed in the corner of my mind, a nagging thought I kept returning to, the way a tongue seeks out the hole in a tooth, drawn to what doesn't belong.

 

 

 

By the end of autumn I was seven months pregnant. Since feeling the child quicken, I'd been happy again. I felt no illness or weakness, as I knew women sometimes did, but strong and healthy. Renewed.

"This child has even made you talkative, Griet," Pieter the father told me often in his sly, teasing way. Although I still did not like it, I had grown accustomed to his manner and only smiled at him.

Even the smells of the Meat Hall on the hottest days of summer did not affect me. I was used to the way blood would gather under and around my fingernails, how it would dry and flake from them at the end of the day. I learned to scrub my hands with vinegar and salt to remove the blood, but the scent of it lingered everywhere like a perfume. As if the air itself were brushed with it.

For generations there had been thirty-two butchers in the Meat Hall at Delft. Though many travellers passed through the city, it was usually servants or the women of a household who came to the Hall. Changing from one butcher to another was rare. So were new faces.

It was a quiet afternoon when she came to our stall. I felt her studying me as I wrapped her order. My skin prickled. 

"So, you're the one he painted," she said, passing me coins.

They tipped from my palm and scattered on the floor while I stood stiff with shock. My heart raced as I knelt to collect them with hands that shook. My mind was loud with questions. Who was this woman? What did she know? Had _he_ sent her?

I stood and took care to wipe each coin clean on my apron, concentrating on the task to calm myself. The woman continued to watch me and I could not escape her. There were no other customers waiting. 

"I have heard a story," she went on, "of a maid who became the assistant of a Guild painter here in Delft. Perhaps you know of her."

I put the coins away and held hard to the edge of the counter. "I do not share in idle gossip," I said, my voice as flat and sober as I knew how to make it. 

Her look was mild, but penetrating, as though my refusal had somehow been a confirmation. "That is a shame. I was hoping to meet her. I have an offer to make her, you see. Something that would be beneficial to the both of us."

I placed my hand on my swollen belly and said nothing.

"If you change your mind," she said with a smile, "ask at the apothecary's for Geertje. He will know where to find me."

For the rest of the day as I served customers I heard her words in my head. _You're the one he painted._ Though Delft was filled with women who had been painted, there was no question who _he_ was. I could only imagine that she had learned of me from someone else, perhaps even seen the painting itself. The thought that people were gossiping about me was unbearable. My cheeks burned and I felt sick with anger and shame. I tasted copper and found I had bitten hard on the inside of my lip without even feeling it. I remembered the hot sting of the needle as it pierced my ear. I reached up under my cap to finger the flesh that was now whole again. A hard lump nestling under the skin was the only evidence that remained.

That night I lay in bed, unable to sleep. Pieter snored softly beside me. The way she had looked at me seemed somehow familiar—the manner of it. I closed my eyes and saw again the way he had studied me as he painted. As if he were seeing me but also seeing through me, seeing _more_. That was how she, too, had looked at me. As though there were something inside me that could only be seen with a certain kind of looking.

 

 

 

The strain of standing for hours became too much for me and I stopped working at the Meat Hall. My afternoon hours were a small, glorious freedom. Some days I visited with my father and mother and we talked while she and I sewed clothes and linens for the baby. My father's mood was cheerful and if not for the heavy weight of my belly I could have imagined I had gone back in time.

On other days I took long walks. Walking seemed to ease the ache in my back and quiet the child inside me. Sometimes I walked by the Beast Market with its scents of dung and urine. The afternoons were always quieter, the auctions over and most of the beasts taken away. Sometimes I walked to the eight-pointed star in Market Square and considered what lay in each direction. But usually I walked along the canals with the wind tugging at my skirts and cap, letting it rush through me so that I was empty and weightless.

When a day came that my walking took me to the door of the apothecary's shop, I was not surprised. I was also not surprised to find the woman from the Meat Hall inside. It seemed to me that for the last two years the path of my life had been formed by such small coincidences. I was like the water running through the canals, capable of motion but only in directions that had already been set.

We stood looking at each other for a moment. Then she spoke.

"Your name is Griet, is that right?"

"Yes."

"I am Geertje. Geertje Pieters."

I nodded in acknowledgement. "You said you had an offer to make me."

"Indeed I do." She indicated the door with her hand. "Would you like to continue walking or would you prefer to sit?"

"I would like to walk, thank you."

We were silent for a time, she matching my slower gait without impatience. "I am glad you finally came to see me," she said. "I had hoped you would."

"I was curious," I admitted.

"And wondering how I had learned about you, no doubt."

"Yes," I said, with some surprise. I had become used to being expected to simply accept what was, to not question how it came to be or why.

"My mistress knows many Guild members in Amsterdam. News travels." She turned her head to smile at me. Even though I was married, I still wore my cap as I had always done, so that she had to step slightly ahead and turn to see my face. She had dark hair but very light eyes, lighter than I remembered, and her smile hinted at a gentle amusement. I relaxed a little.

"You are from Amsterdam then?" I asked.

"No, I am from Delft. Both my mistress and I are. I come home often to see my family."

"Your mistress is very generous."

"She is, although I suppose we are more like family than mistress and servant. Maria is a wonderful painter. Years ago, she taught me to grind colours for her and then later to paint. And that is the offer I want to make to you, Griet."

That made me stop and turn to her. "I don't understand."

"If you accept, I will pay you five stuivers a week. In return, you will keep my studio clean, buy supplies on my account, and grind the colours I need. In time, if you wish it, I will also teach you to paint."

I felt as if the earth had tilted under my feet. "But why? Why would you do that for me? You do not know me."

Geertje studied me as she had that day in the Meat Hall. "No, my dear. But I know what it's like to be where you are, or where you have been. I have known the frustrated longing of being denied. And when I heard of what happened to you, how you were treated, it made me angry. You are not the first to be used and discarded by a wealthy man, nor will you be the last. But it's in my power to help you and so I want to."

I did not know what to say. I looked to the sky for guidance but all I saw was a sparrow flitting out of sight. The answer, I knew, must be mine. "May I ask you something?" I said after a few moments.

"Of course."

"Have you seen it? My painting?"

"No, I haven't. We are not grand enough for the likes of Master van Ruijven. And I have heard that he guards your painting quite closely. Few have been allowed to glimpse it at all."

For some reason that knowledge made me a little ill. I swallowed against it. "I wish I knew why he wanted a painting only of me," I confessed. "I was only a maid. I am not even beautiful."

She studied me for a brief time and I wondered what she saw. "It is your eyes, my dear," she said. "Those eyes hold secrets. Men think that if they possess you, they possess your secrets. It is maddening for them to learn the truth."

"What is the truth?"

"That they possess nothing you do not allow them."

I thought of what the master's friend, van Leeuwenhoek, had told me the first time we met. _Take care to remain yourself._ It seemed to me now that his warning and Geertje's truth were one. I thought of the way Pieter had pursued me, the way van Ruijven had grabbed at me, even the way my master had once stood in the doorway and gazed at my hair.

For all these months I had thought that something was taken from me in the house on the Oude Langendijck, something precious and indefinable. But nothing had been given freely except, perhaps, my love. And even that was mine to withdraw. For the first time, I knew that I was not diminished in any way by the actions of others. It was astonishing to discover.

Geertje's light eyes watched me and when I looked at her again she smiled as if she knew what I had been thinking. Perhaps she did.

The sun above me felt warmer, my spirit lighter. I smiled at her in return.

"Do we have an agreement, then?" she asked, as we began to walk again.

"Yes," I said, a half-forgotten feeling stirring within me. Hope. 

That evening I told Pieter of the arrangement. He was pleased with the sum I would earn for such easy work. I did not tell him about the colours or about Geertje's offer to teach me to paint. I wanted something of my own to keep, something that was only mine. When he asked me how I knew Geertje, I told him that she was a customer from the Meat Hall. It was, after all, the truth.

 

 

 

Jan was born in early February, during the coldest part of winter. He was a calm baby, content to study the world from blue eyes like his father's. His birth feast was not such a grand affair as had been held for Franciscus, yet it was filled with more joy than I ever found in the house on the Oude Langendijck.

On the following morning I found another parcel outside our gate. Like the first, it was wrapped in plain paper and tied with string. The sight of it reminded me of the secret I'd hidden away almost a year ago. I had not even noticed when it stopped haunting me.

By the fire, with Jan asleep in his cradle, I unwrapped the parcel to find another box, identical to the first. This time the parchment inside held piles of madder and massicot, lead-tin yellow, and some of the rarer, more costly colours. There was even a tiny portion of ultramarine, no larger than my fingernail. I had never ground lapis lazuli to make the pure blue. He had always performed that difficult task himself. I wanted to reach out and touch it, that impossible blue, but knew that if I did it would merely cling to my fingers and be wasted.

When all of the new colours were arranged before me on the floor, I collected the rest from the cupboard and spread them out as well. I sat in front of a rainbow, admiring the way the moving flames highlighted some and left others in shadow. I remembered being in the kitchen on the morning I became a maid. Me at the table with my vegetable wheel, the colours separated on the platter to make sense. I remembered looking at the clouds and seeing for the first time more than just white. I remembered watching day by day as his paintings became living things.

Excitement stole through me and made my heart beat faster in my chest. The gifts he had given me no longer seemed a burden, an imposition. They had ceased to belong to him as soon as I received them. They were mine now and I would accept them freely. I would learn what Geertje had to teach.

 

 

**1675**

 

I learned of his death at the Meat Hall.

It was December. Everything of significance in my life seemed to occur during winter. Or perhaps I only imagined that was so. The short days and long nights made winter feel longer than any other season. The change in the light, the lack of it, caused the time to slow and stretch in my mind. 

Gone were the days when the mere thought of him could cause me pain, when a distant glimpse of him walking caused my heart to thunder painfully, when I still held hope that he cared for me. In the years that had passed I had lost my father and birthed another son. My days were filled with Jan and Frans, with my mother who seemed without compass after my father's death, and with painting. The language of colour and form.

Tanneke was the one who came to tell me. Seeing her standing before me sent me back into the past in a rush. For a moment I did not know where or when I was. She stood stiffly and her look was as ill-tempered as I remembered, though with something more brittle behind it than before. I was surprised to see her at our stall. After I had left the house of Vermeer, the family had begun buying their meat from another butcher.

"What would you like?" I asked, recollecting myself.

Tanneke shook her head. "I have only come to tell you that the master is dead. I thought you would want to know."

It was as if a great silence engulfed me at her blunt words. The sounds of the Meat Hall faded away until all that was left was my breathing and the rapid beat of my heart. Once, when I was small, I had fallen in the canal while I was playing. My head had gone under and the water closed over my ears so that I was cocooned. It had only been a few seconds until my father pulled me out but I had never forgotten the quality of that underwater silence, how aware I was of the sound of blood rushing through my body, how loud it seemed.

Tanneke's words had plunged me back into that water.

"Aren't you going to say something?" she demanded.

It took me a moment to attach meaning to the movement of her lips. "I am very sorry for the family," I said.

"Yes, well," she grumbled, "it's a very bad situation, you know. There is a lot of debt. But my mistress will see things righted."

So her loyalty was still to Maria Thins. I supposed it was just as well for her now. "Please give them my condolences."

She nodded but I was unsure whether or not she would. I did not imagine that Catharina would care to hear of me even after all this time, but perhaps Tanneke would say something to Maria Thins or one of the older girls. Having lived through the death of my own father, I truly did feel great compassion for them all.

I was about to say something of that nature when I felt a small pair of arms encircle one of my legs. I looked down to find little Frans grinning up at me. Behind him came the slower figures of my mother and Jan, who was holding her hand. I smiled and stroked Frans' soft blond hair before turning back to Tanneke. The look she gave me was one I could not read. Envy, perhaps.

"I must return to my mistress," she said curtly.

"Thank you for coming," I said, and meant it. Far better to hear the news from her lips than as a piece of market gossip.

With a short nod and another glance behind me, she turned and walked away.

"Someone you know?" asked my mother.

"No," I lied. "She brought a message from Madam Pieters." None of my family had ever asked me the reason I had left the house on the Oude Langendijck and I had never offered any. Nor did they know about my painting. My father had guessed, before he died, but no one else.

I asked my mother if she would look after the boys for a few hours. She did not question me though I could see she wanted to. I do not know what I would have told her if she had.

I went to the studio. Geertje no longer came to Delft as often as she used to and the space was mostly mine. It was a refuge of sorts; it soothed me with its scent of linseed oil and its whitewashed walls. But it was the light that I loved and that had captured me the first time I entered. The room had windows facing both east and west, with the north and south walls taken over by shelves and cupboards. At any time of day the light was extraordinary, even in mid-winter; rich or shallow, blue or yellow, every particular type and colour of light would come if you were patient.

It wasn't a desire to paint that drew me, but a need to be among the sights and smells that I loved. I felt closer to him there than anywhere else and I could not imagine a better place to mourn him.

He had shown me light. He had shown me new ways of seeing. In a way he had been my camera obscura, helping me to see deeper than the surface of things.

I had loved him. But he had not loved me, no more than he loved any of his tools. Perhaps what had made him such a poor husband and father was what made him a great artist. His heart held room for only one thing; all of him was in service to the light.

I no longer begrudged that in him. It was the legacy he had left me and I could not regret it. All of my paintings shone somewhere with his eyes. The inside of an oyster shell, a shadowed patch of cloud, the early morning sky before sunrise. He echoed through my work the way a single bell note carries on a still evening. My vision was not his — I painted no figures, only simple everyday scenes: the clouds above Delft, a table laid with a single meal, a dog sleeping — but he had shown me the possibility of joy.

Wandering through the studio, I touched a palette knife here, an easel there. I did not cry. Instead, I looked at my paintings and wondered what he would have seen. What he would have heard now that I had finally found my voice. And then I pushed the thoughts aside for good.

That night after Pieter and the boys had gone to sleep, I crept out of bed and took the pearl earrings from their hiding place. I had never worn them again after he finished the painting. For a long time I could not even look at them without pain. They became nothing more than symbols of all I had been forced to lose. Now as I held them up to the window to let the moonlight ignite their lustre, I felt only a gentle sadness. How strange to think that something so beautiful could come from nothing more than sea and time. How something so precious and rare could be born from a rough body so unlike it.

In my hand, the surface of the pearls seemed to glow with a new light. It was warmer and milkier than what fell from the moon or the stars. These were not the possessions of a maid or a butcher's wife and yet they were mine. Perhaps one day I would have a daughter and these would be my gift to her. I would tell her how they were formed through work and sorrow. I would show her how their smooth bodies captured and held the light. She would look at them and know that their worth was far beyond the grit of their beginning.

**Author's Note:**

> Geertje Pieters (aka Geertgen Wyntges) really was a painter, whose mistress really was Maria van Oosterwijck, and she really was from Delft. All else is my imagination. What little information there is about her can be found starting [here](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geertgen_Wyntges).


End file.
